What do you do with your Blu-ray discs?

[cw-kid]

Hi

Just wondering what others do with their Blu-ray discs ?

I am currently being lazy and just ripping the entire disc to ISO image. I have AnyDVD HD installed on my Windows 7 PC and just use the My Movies MCE UI Disc Copier to rip them to the WHS.

Obviously ISO's are massive in file size and I might be better ripping the main movie only to some format ?

What do you do?

[STC]

Not really useful info, but personally I don't have that big a collection of discs. Typically I only watch a movie once, maybe twice, so my collection (all meagre 30 odd of them) stay on the disc. We rent or watch ones recorded from TV.

[milli260876]

take out the main movie as m2ts then recode with handbrake to mp4(large file size) or tmpgenc gives you a better UI and a few different options...
depends how i feel on the day!!!
oh and VC-1 only seems to play nice in handbrake??? dunno why...

[TheOsburnFamil]

I use Auto Rip-n-Compress to rip all my Blurays. However, I just recently STOPPED ripping to ISO, in favor of ripping to folder. Mainly due to time (it adds extra time for BurnImg to rebuild a BD ISO).
But, also, I started realizing I may one day decide to get rid of everything but the main title(s), and having it in folders instead of ISO will make it a lot easier.
So I use ARnC for the RIPs and MyMovies for the collection data (barcode/UPCs make it REALLY easy to make sure I get the right one—if something’s missing, I add the data). Then, I use TMT5 for the playback.
The only downside to this is that I can’t watch this stuff on extenders.
I toyed around with ripping the main movie to MKV (no re-encode, just re-mux from .M2TS to .MKV), so that I could do extender playback. But, in practice, whenever we want to watch a bluray, it’s on the big TV with the big audio. If it’s in a smaller room with an extender, there isn’t a big-ass TV or surround-sound, so we just fire the same movie up from Hulu or Netflix instead.

[StumpyBloke]

Pretty much the same as you Stuart, using anydvd hd and media center mountimage! Simple as, and works a treat!

[TechLifeWeb]

In General, I rip discs (DVD or BR) to MKV with MakeMKV. I generally keep the full size of DVD files. For Blu-ray, if I want to compress, I use Ripbot264 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127611 I don't have extenders anymore so MKV works great for me.

[.Nico]

I just play them with TMT5 on my Media Centre.

.Nico

[Danno100]

I convert to mp4 using Xillisoft. No need for extra's as i have the original on disc. Plays natively in WMC.

[mmatheny]

Use them for skeet targets?!

[JTScribe]

Rip them to ISOs and then store them in a safe place.

My server has (1) 2TB drive, (3) 1.5TB drives, (2) 500GB drives and (2) 300GB drives. Don't worry about reduncancy as I have the physical media but have the 500GB and 300GB drives RAID1 striped to archive home movies and photos (which I also keep on flash as a second backup.)

[TheBigCheese]

Rip em to HDD and then use TSmuxer to strip out everything except the film, I'm never interested in the extras.

[holidayboy]

I hang em in the garden to scare off the birds.

(I sometimes rip them to hdd first - like TheOsburnFamil)

[nxsfan]

I loved the idea behind RATDVD. It's amazing that there is no way to retain the menu, but simply compress the video content, audio track, delete some undesired content, etc.

[TheOsburnFamil]

I hang em in the garden to scare off the birds.

(I sometimes rip them to hdd first - like TheOsburnFamil)

lol

[dduk]

All of my DVDs and Blu-rays get ripped to MKV where I select just the main feature, audio track and subtitles. I recently got shot of TMT5 and instead have installed LAV Filters - a REALLY simple install and nothing to configure. Everything (blu-ray included) gets played within media centre.

[milli260876]

All of my DVDs and Blu-rays get ripped to MKV where I select just the main feature, audio track and subtitles. I recently got shot of TMT5 and instead have installed LAV Filters - a REALLY simple install and nothing to configure. Everything (blu-ray included) gets played within media centre.

what is this magical LAV filters of which you speak..??

[dduk]

what is this magical LAV filters of which you speak..??

Magic is definitely the word, Lee.

Last week the good lady was away for a few days on business and I thought it would be a good time to fix a long list of niggles affecting the WAF (GAF in my case) with our primary media centre.

In the end, I pulled everything out of the case, vacuumed it all down and performed a clean install of W7. Over the past year, the machine had had its graphics card changed numerous times and various bits of software installed/uninstalled which I'm sure haven’t helped.

The new install is a stripped down install even to the point where I've replaced Explorer as the shell with Media Centre so the machine boots straight into MC, no taskbars etc. - this works and looks great.

When it came to installing TMT5 for Blu-ray playback, I paused and wondered if there was a different approach. I loved TMT3 but TMT5 annoys me with its integration - when I stop a film, I don't want to be looking at an 'Information Center' - I want to be back at the MyMovies interface, for example.

As it was a clean install, I took an image of the HDD and played with Shark007's codec pack. I've always hated codec packs for obvious reasons and I was quickly able to remind myself why I did - the UI is dreadful and I just got the feeling that everything was being held together with string and hope. I wasn't too happy with the install of the Bing/Ask bar without my express permission either (it turns out the agreement is buried in the EULA).

I restored from the image as the codec pack refused to uninstall properly (no surprise there) and did some digging around on the web. I discovered the LAV filters and they looked perfect. It has a built-in splitter so there's no need for Haali's splitter (or other) and it's capable of bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA too.

The installer was one EXE for both x86 and x64 (unlike Shark007) and installed very quickly - there's also the option to select which media formats you want it to decode. Once you've installed - that’s it, no settings to fiddle with, in fact, there's nowhere to fiddle with them.

All I had to do at that point was download an EXE called Graphstudio (stand-alone) and select an MKV with an HD audio track. Within Graphstudio I right-clicked on the LAV audio filter, selected properties and told it to bitstream the formats I wanted bitstreaming. From that point on, all my Dolby, DTS audio is sent to the AVR - Graphstudio is no longer required.

I can now watch Blu-rays natively within Media Centre. I've only been using the LAV filters for a couple of days, so there might be a few issues yet to find.

Apologies for the long and for the most part unnecessary post - I'm a bit excited about all this now.

[StumpyBloke]

Aaron, top post there me 'ode mucker, thanks!!!

Does this setup allow bitstreaming of HD audio, ie DTS Master HD via HDMI?

Hope the GF appreciates your work!! :d

[dduk]

Aaron, top post there me 'ode mucker, thanks!!!

Does this setup allow bitstreaming of HD audio, ie DTS Master HD via HDMI?

Thanks Rich.

I currently have this set up on three of my machines at home, two of which are using an ATI 5450 connected to an HD-audio capable AVR via HDMI.

Out of the box, the LAV Filters will turn a DTS-HD stream into a regular DTS one, but you need to open an unrelated application called Graph Studio* and tell the filter that it needs to bitstream certain formats (in my case, all of them (Dolby & DTS)). Once that's done, you can do away with Graph Studio and LAV will bitstream these formats for all other files.

At the moment, LAV Filters doesn't have any config app (one of the features that appeals to me), but I would imagine that in the future you could set the bitstreaming without GraphStudio.

*GraphStudio seems to be an application that's actually meant to trace which codecs are being used at any one time - quite handy.

Hope the GF appreciates your work!! :d

Ha!

[StumpyBloke]

Thanks Aaron!

PS your 'ha' speaks volumes about what your GF thinks!! LOL :d